Vita and Catarina's Dictionary

João Biehl's book Vita (University of California Press: 2005) traces zones of social abandonment in Brazil.  Biehl provides a compelling anthropological account of one woman's journey to and in Vita where she is left to die.  Through Catarina's story, this work adequately problematizes the societal and familial forces that actively purge members deemed unproductive.  Successful insofar as it exposes an otherwise unidentified issue of human rights and human agency, this book's attempt to give Catarina a voice by publishing her "dictionary"* ultimately reduces the value of her expression to its production output, reifying the same calculation that rendered her expendable.

Here is an excerpt from her "dictionary" (p. 5-6):

Computer

Desk

Maimed

Writer

Labor justice

Student's law

Seated in the office

Law of love-makers

Public notary

law, relation

Ademar

Ipiranga district

Municipality of Caiçara

Rio Grande do Sul

...

Hospital

Operation

Defects

Recovery

Prejudice

...

Frightened heart

Emotional spasm

Whether or not this or similar entries is a poem is not as important to me, as why Biehl insists on characterizing her "dictionary" as poetry.  Her patterns of word association and her choices of what to report seem very meaningful from a sociological, psychological, and even linguistic perspective for this is the greatest first hand account the reader has of Catarina's voice.  At times her words do have poetic resonance, which I respect and appreciate, but I take issue with Biehl's presentation of this material (literary or otherwise).  He seems to offer this "dictionary" as a way to prove Catarina's worth.  It is as if Biehl is saying: even alienated, paralyzed, and in deteriorating health Catarina constructs these verbal matrices that are beautiful.  And it is presented that because of this beauty the reader should be outraged she has been left to die on the outskirts of society.  Even in the exposition and criticism of human rights abuses and a society that disposes of nonproductive members, Catarina's production value (creating something beautiful) remains a prerequisite for her access to those fundamental rights.

* Explanation from p. 5 of Vita's Introduction: "Catarina told me that she had begun to write what she called her 'dictionary.'  She was doing this 'to not forget the words.'  Her handwriting conveyed minimal literacy, and the notebook was filled with strings of words containing references to persons, places, institutions, diseases, things, and dispositions that seemed so imaginatively connected that at times I thought this was poetry."